STRICTLY FICTIONAL TIFFANY LEE-YOUNGREN
A soul divided cannot stand when the gusts of reality blow in
San Diego Union-Tribune
October 2, 2005
Wolf Point
Edward Falco
Unbridled Books, 240 pages, $29.95
Think of Edward Falco as William Blake with cinematic potential. As with Blake's famed paeans to the lamb and the "tyger tyger, burning bright," Falco's debut novel seeks to "shew the two contrary states of the human soul," to dissect innocence and experience down to the rumbling guts.
And Falco, for one, understands that the best way to get there isn't necessarily by way of one precise incision. It's the knuckle-whitening twists along the way that reveal the human capacity for change and self-discovery: that point at which innocence becomes experience and experience is understood.
Adrift in a haze of confusion and alienation and on a journey away from himself, 57-year-old businessman Tom "T" happens upon two particularly scurrilous looking hitchhikers: Jenny, a trashy, nubile young blond, and leather-clad, long-haired Lester, a thug if there ever was one.
"T knew better than to stop, which was why he did," Falco writes, and from that fateful moment on "Wolf Point" blows by with the speed of dead leaves caught in a windstorm. Jenny and Lester are revealed to be ruffians on the run from a drug deal gone bad, and T a refugee from a criminal record of his own. Numb, alone and searching for "the ecstasy of desire," T had previously downloaded a pornographic photograph of a young girl being seduced by an older couple, a decision that culminated in a visit from the local police, and ultimately, divorce from his wife and separation from his children.
"It's terrible, I know, he wanted to say. In the real world, it's terrible. But this is a picture. I was fascinated by a picture. I wasn't sanctioning what happened, I was looking at an image. There's a difference, he wanted to say. There's an important difference. In the real world, it's terrible, it's a crime; but this is an image, a powerful, troubling, resonant image that reaches someplace deep and disturbing. I was interested in the image; I wasn't sanctioning the act. I didn't do anything, he wanted to say, except look at a picture."
It's a controversial stance, yet Falco – a wise and courageous author – doesn't shy away from it. To keep his story from becoming so much made-for-TV sensationalism, Falco goes deep to explore themes of purity and corruption, beauty and decay, stupidity and wisdom, imbuing his novel with an autumnal motif that mirrors T's senescence and illustrates the corresponding contrasts with Jenny's beauty and foolhardiness.
It's only after getting tangled up with Lester and Jenny – ultimately putting his life at risk – that T is able to look his own failures and misgivings dead in the eye, scrutinizing his past in an effort to "put his story together" and transform an act of recklessness into one of reckoning.